You're missing the point which is: when Google was funded, it wasn't Google, the king of search, as we know it today, but yet another search engine in a saturated market, started by 2 academics with no business background.
The reason they were founded was that they convinced the investors that their plans and ambitions go beyond what they've built so far.
It's a remarkable lack of imagination to not see a potential in a good, collaborative web editor. Sure, if they don't ever write a single line of code, it's not going to be anything special. But they probably will and they probably have many ideas on how to move this project forward.
An obvious evolution would be to turn it into a web-based IDE, competing with the likes of cloud9.
Or they could make it an embeddable editor widget usable by others (it's surprisingly difficult to build a decent web-based editor and a lot of web-based software (a forum, a commenting system, q/a sites) needs a good editor).
Or many, many other possibilities. Stop thinking of it as a finished product. Think of it as a first step in a thousand-step journey and try to imagine what the other 999 steps could be.
FWIW, PageRank is a relatively minor component of the ranking algorithm (I dunno why people latch onto it...maybe because it's a public, patented, easy soundbite), and the core Google ranking algorithm was entirely rewritten by Amit Singhal in 2001. The ranking edge that most people associate with Google wasn't even written when Google got its funding, and its inventor hadn't yet been hired.
I'm saying that PageRank isn't the ranking edge that Google is famous for, and that if you applied the ranking algorithm as invented by Larry and Sergey to the web (even the web at the time, before everyone started to game Google), it would suck. It might suck a bit less than AltaVista, which was why they got funded, but it's not at all the quality that people have come to associate with Google.
The reason they were founded was that they convinced the investors that their plans and ambitions go beyond what they've built so far.
It's a remarkable lack of imagination to not see a potential in a good, collaborative web editor. Sure, if they don't ever write a single line of code, it's not going to be anything special. But they probably will and they probably have many ideas on how to move this project forward.
An obvious evolution would be to turn it into a web-based IDE, competing with the likes of cloud9.
Or they could make it an embeddable editor widget usable by others (it's surprisingly difficult to build a decent web-based editor and a lot of web-based software (a forum, a commenting system, q/a sites) needs a good editor).
Or many, many other possibilities. Stop thinking of it as a finished product. Think of it as a first step in a thousand-step journey and try to imagine what the other 999 steps could be.